‘Halloween Ends’: Deteriorating horror franchise deserves its fate

Even Michael Myers looks tired in “Halloween Ends.”

The Shape looks a little out of shape and you can’t really blame the big lug, given he’s sustained an insane number of injuries through the decades. Not to lose sight of the fact Michael is the boogeyman/villain in the franchise that kicked off with John Carpenter’s minimalist horror classic way back in 1978, and he’s killed dozens upon dozens of humans since then — but Michael himself is beat to hell by now. If he were in the NFL, he’d never pass the protocol to play on Sundays.

These are the observations one makes while enduring the often ridiculous, predictably grisly, wildly inconsistent and utterly tiresome “Halloween Ends,” the final entry in David Gordon Green’s trio of films (after “Halloween” in 2018 and last year’s “Halloween Kills”) that serve as direct sequels to the original and ignore all the other crummy entries in between, e.g., “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers” (1989) and “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers” (1995).

Despite the iconic presence of Final Grandmother Jamie Lee Curtis and a few attempts to frame the saga of Michael Myers into some sort of big-picture analysis about society’s need for a villain and the tendency of some to blame the victims for crimes, this is a cheap-looking slashfest that asks returning characters to behave in ways that make no sense, while adding the usual array of obnoxious nitwits who exist only to annoy us before they’re sliced and diced like entrées at Benihana.

The bulk of “Halloween Ends” takes place four years after the mass carnage events of the last film, with Michael Myers once again out there … somewhere (let’s just say the local and state authorities once again do a really poor job of keeping tabs on this guy), and Curtis’ Laurie Strode writing her memoirs and deciding she’ll no longer hide from her fears. Why, she’s even decorating her house for Halloween; that’s right, Laurie is leaning into Oct. 31st!

Alas, many of the surviving townsfolk of Haddonfield, Illinois, treat Laurie like a pariah and blame her for goading Michael into his killing sprees. Oh, and Laurie almost instantly regrets playing matchmaker between the creepy Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who killed a young boy in a bizarre babysitting accident just a few years prior, and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who lives with Laurie and works as a nurse and is filled with so much resentment and anger over her parents’ murders that she makes one horribly bad and potentially fatal decision after another. And we haven’t even talked about the four teen toughs from the local high school band who delight in tormenting Corey. That’s right: They’re MARCHING BAND BULLIES.

“Halloween Ends” spends so much time focusing on the obviously deranged Corey and the conflict between Allyson and Laurie and serving up metaphors that it almost forgets it’s a Michael Myers slasher film — but when the killings come, it’s the usual medley of gruesome and mildly creative stabbings, shootings, beatings, more stabbings, more stabbings, stabbings, stabbings, etc., etc.

They say this is “Halloween Ends.”

I say: Can we get that in writing?